Last Lie (9 page)

She did. All of Hella's patient's architectural descriptions about the house were correct. Peter and Adrienne had added a two-story addition to the back--east side--of the house immediately after they moved in. On the first floor of the addition was a family room. Above it, an extension of the master suite. Peter had also lined one of the small upstairs bedrooms with floor-to-ceiling walnut bookshelves so that his wife, Adrienne, a urologist, could have a proper office.

"My patient thanked both of her friends for the party and said good night. She went to the guest room, shut the door, used the bathroom, changed into the pajamas, and climbed into bed."

"She said everything about the guest room--the pajamas, the linens, the mattress, everything--was so much nicer than what she was used to. They left bottled water for her, a fresh toothbrush. New soaps, everything. She said she felt completely pampered in that guest suite. It was as though she was staying in the kind of hotels she saw pictures of in magazines."

I had been in the suite Hella was describing before. I'd followed Adrienne in there once as she was preparing the space for a new nanny after the previous nanny had departed in a huff. Adrienne's nannies mostly departed in huffs.

The nanny/guest suite at the back of the original house was a nice space, but I never considered it opulent. It sounded to me as though Mimi and Mattin might have spruced it up a bit.

I was impatient to get to the ending. I was waiting, almost literally on the edge of my seat, for the unknown acquaintance rapist to enter from the wings.

Hella said, "Oh my God, we're out of time! I have an eleven o'clock." She looked at me, then at her watch. "I'm not sure I can get back to my office on time. I may be late." Her eyes revealed an emotion I had never seen in her face before--mortification pureed with disbelief. "I am
never
late, Alan. Never."

It was true, at least with me. Hella was never late.

"Hella, that's fine, I understand if you need to go. But I absolutely need to hear the rest of this story. I need to know what's going on with your patient, both psychologically and legally, in case something comes up. I can't be in the dark on this. What time are you done tonight?"

She hit some buttons on her phone. I assumed she was checking her calendar. "Six fifteen," she said. "By the time I actually walk out to my car though, it'll be closer to six thirty."

I would still be with a patient at six thirty. "Can you come back here at seven?"

She was pulling on her jacket as she took two tentative steps toward the door. "I will really have to get something to eat. Blood sugar? Sorry. How about eight o'clock?"

That would mean I wouldn't get home until well after nine. Lauren was going to be exhausted by then. Asking her to manage the kids and get them fed and ready for bed wasn't fair to her, especially on an infusion day.

I said, "Do you have any breaks during the rest of today? Any brief windows when we could meet?"

Hella was at the door. Her purse was on her shoulder. Her keys were in one hand. Her phone was in the other. She said, "She is such a sweet woman, I want to go over and give her a hug and tell her she'll get through this. But don't worry, I won't. I'll check my calendar, and I'll text you about possible times. Sorry, but I really have to go."

12

T
he time between appointments for me can be brief. Seconds, literally. One patient leaves. The door closes behind her. I step down the hall to greet the next patient in the waiting room. Sometimes I'll schedule three sessions back-to-back-to-back. Three is about all my bladder will permit.

Shifting gears becomes second nature. I've grown accustomed to leaving the intensity of one patient's life behind as the door closes behind him so that I can permit the intensity of the next patient's life to enter my awareness and become the focus of my concentration. Somehow in the short, solitary walk I make from my office to the waiting room, I am almost always able to clear my head and set aside whatever insistent emotional pressure I was feeling from the affective undertow of the previous session.

That morning, my ability to compartmentalize failed me. I couldn't stop thinking about my supervision appointment with Hella Zoet and what had happened to Burning Man Lady shortly after she mused that the linens in my neighbor's guest bedroom were the quality of a five-star resort's.

BEFORE WORK THAT MORNING, I had dropped Lauren at an infusion center near Community Hospital so she could receive her monthly dose of Tysabri. The IV-only drug was a monoclonal antibody intended to prevent an acute exacerbation of her multiple sclerosis.

An MS exacerbation--the formation of scarring caused by an acute loss of myelin somewhere in her central nervous system--can be a small thing to an MS sufferer, or it can be a big thing. Many exacerbations are silent; a patient like Lauren wouldn't know she'd had one of those until a routine MRI indicated a plaque in her brain that hadn't been visible on a prior scan. Other new lesions--plaques--cause immediately apparent symptoms like vision loss, numbness, weakness, pain, or bladder problems. The list of possible new symptoms from an MS lesion is almost as long as the human body is complex.

With each new MS symptom, dice get rolled on the craps table that is multiple sclerosis. How those dice come up determines important things for the person with the disease. The new symptom, or symptoms, caused by the newly faulty neural wiring, might be transient--days, weeks, or months in duration--or the new symptom might prove to be permanent. Any recovery from the symptoms, if recovery occurs at all--that's not a guarantee--might be complete, or the recovery might be only partial.

Partial may mean 90 percent resolved or only 10 percent resolved.

The remission that follows the fresh exacerbation may extend for years. Or the next relapse may come the same afternoon.

With MS, the dice are always rolling.

The major exacerbation Lauren experienced in Holland had robbed her of a lot. For weeks she was almost paralyzed in her lower extremities. These many months later, she was still too weak to walk without a cane. The prophylactic drug that Lauren had been taking before the switch to Tysabri knocked her off her feet for a day or more each week with severe side effects. Despite the fact that the new drug required her to schlep across town to get the IV, Tysabri was proving to be much less intrusive to her life. Once she left the infusion center Lauren usually felt as well as she did going in.

The Tysabri that was pumped into her vein that morning would do nothing to undo the damage from the last truck that hit her. The drug's sole purpose was to keep Lauren from being hit by the next truck, from suffering the next exacerbation. Because every MS preventative medicine--each more profanely expensive than the next--was nothing more than prophylaxis against a rare event, it was always an act of faith for me to believe that any of them was more than god-awfully expensive modern sorcery.

Although scientific data revealed that the drugs reduced exacerbation frequencies and disability profiles across a sample of MS sufferers, there was no way to be sure that any particular medicine was at all salutary for a specific individual. Like my wife. With Lauren's MS, I had days I believed in Tysabri like I believed the earth rotated around the sun, and I had other days when I believed that MS was in the hands of a god whose portfolio included folly and fate.

Even during days when I believed in science, I had moments when I was sure I could hear the dice tumbling after they'd been tossed by that god, as he laughed.

WHEN I ARRIVED to pick Lauren up at the infusion center after my supervision appointment, she responded to my "How are you doing?" by telling me she was feeling "okay." Between us, the word had a certain meaning. It didn't indicate "fine." It meant "tolerable." Or "how I expect to feel." It almost always meant
Don't inquire further, please.

I knew the dialect. I didn't inquire further.

Lauren then asked me to take her to work, not back home, which had been the original plan.

"Do you have time for lunch first?" I asked. "I'm free until one thirty."

"I'd love to," she said.

I turned onto Ninth, the mountains to our right. "Do you feel up to walking a couple of blocks?" I was hoping to park at my office; midday parking near the Boulder Mall was always a bitch.

"What are you thinking? Brasserie Ten Ten? The Kitchen?"

Not quite. I'd been thinking I had a nonintrusive way of discovering how strong she was feeling. But I said what else I was thinking. "Actually, I was thinking Salt."

"That sounds great. You want to park at your office? Why don't you drop me off at the restaurant first? I'll get us a table."

I dropped Lauren off on the west edge of the Downtown Mall before I weaved over to Walnut to park at my office. By the time I hustled back to Pearl Street, Lauren was seated at a table by the windows that fronted 11th. I leaned over and kissed her on the lips. As I pulled away from Lauren's face, I thought I noted a novel scent on her neck, perhaps the slightest trace of a new perfume.

At another phase of our relationship together I would have told her that I liked the fragrance--in fact, I did like it; the new scent was alluring. But in the wake of the revelation of her infidelity in Holland, the novelty of my wife wearing a new perfume could be cause for fresh suspicion. Or it could be a subtle plea on her part that she wanted us to turn the page to something new.

Or it could be she just wanted to try a fresh scent.

Only a week before, as I made our bed, I'd spotted Lauren's handwriting on a solitary sheet of paper on her bedside table. The paper had been torn from a notepad from the Boulderado Hotel. The note she'd written said "Elliot," and was followed by "303" and seven more digits in an unfamiliar cadence that likely indicated a Colorado mobile number. I knew the odds were high that the Elliot in question was Elliot Bellhaven, one of Lauren's superiors at the DA's office. I assumed the number was for Elliot's cell.

What I didn't know was why the Boulderado Hotel notepad was the location that Lauren had chosen to write down the number. Most likely, she'd used it because it was handy. I could think of ten benign reasons why hotel stationery had been handy at the moment that Lauren had needed to jot down the number.

I could also think of one malignant reason.

It had taken me most of two days to reject the malignant option. I'd ended up exhausted by the emotional effort. I could not stand how much work it took at times to tamp down my doubt.

"This is a nice treat," she said as I sat down, my thoughts about her new perfume still my own. I feared that the labor that would be required to move the mystery of the new perfume onto the neutral shelf alongside the Boulderado notepad would psychologically annihilate me.

"Yes, we should do this more often," I said.

The perfume found my nose again. I needed a distraction. Our lunch would be only my second meal at Salt, which hadn't been open long. I looked around the compact restaurant, which I was seeing for the first time during the daytime. I couldn't help but notice the narrow confines and recognize how little actual physical space almost two and a half million dollars had purchased on this prime corner in downtown Boulder.

Salt's footprint was a tiny fraction of the size of the
Camera
property across the street. The value of the land Raoul was considering buying? Had to be astronomical.

I couldn't tell Lauren about what I'd learned during my supervision with Hella. As an alternative, as casually as I could, I asked, "Have you heard anything from your office that might explain why the detectives were at our house on Saturday? I still haven't figured that out."

She sipped some water. She straightened the napkin on her lap. She seemed uncomfortable with my question. I also thought that she seemed like she didn't want to appear uncomfortable with my question. She said, "Nothing I can talk about. Sorry. You understand, right? Sometimes, I just can't discuss . . . things . . . that happen at work. Same thing with you and your patients." She shrugged, mostly with her left shoulder.

She had no way to know that our many years together had taught me to trust her one-shoulder shrugs just a little bit less than her two-shoulder shrugs. The one-shoulder shrugs had reliably proven to be less sincere.

On another day, a day when I hadn't heard the recitation of facts, once removed, from one of the alleged participants in the events of Friday night, I probably would have simply nodded agreement to my wife--what she'd said was certainly true, although I was withholding judgment about how honest it was--and allowed my line of inquiry to expire.

Because of what I'd learned in supervision, that wasn't another day. I said, "But you do know why Sam and the sheriff's investigator were there?" She didn't answer me right away. I said, "You can at least tell me if there is an investigation ongoing, can't you? That can't be a secret."

"I do know some of what's going on. But it's being handled higher up the food chain, so I'd really prefer not to say anything about an investigation. Or not."

"Why all the secrecy? I mean, it can't be that big a deal, right? I haven't seen anything in the news."

Lauren's eyes went wide. "So much happens in our office that never hits the news, Alan. God, what our lives would be like at work if the public actually knew what we did every day. Innocent people can be damned by the taint of our attention. It wouldn't be fair if we talked about . . . everything."

The public--that includes me--typically knows only what leaks from the district attorney's office, or what goes to court, where a public record is created. Investigations that don't lead to charges? We never know.

"From where I sit," I said disingenuously, "it seems like it's blown over already. No one from the sheriff's office has been back out to Spanish Hills. Mimi and Mattin seem to be out of town. Am I missing something?"

She made a cute face, wrinkling her nose. "Things aren't always as they seem."

A waiter came by. Lauren ordered iced tea. I asked for lemonade and iced tea. I refused to call the drink an Arnold Palmer.

The waiter said, "An Arnold Palmer?"

I said I would just have lemonade. He left. "Please?" I said to Lauren. "Just give me a hint."

"This isn't like you, Alan. Usually when I tell you I can't talk about something, you let it go."

True.
"Usually, it doesn't involve my neighbors. I think I have reason to be concerned about something so close to our home. If something significant happened across the lane, I want to know about it. We have kids to worry about."

Lauren gazed out the window. I had intended for it to be a hard argument for her to counter.

"Okay," she said. "Some allegations were made. The facts are in dispute."

"Allegations of . . . ? What? Poor seasoning? Watering down the booze? It was a housewarming."

"Please."

I lowered my already quiet voice to a whisper. "Sam was there on his day off. Is it a felony, Lauren?"

"There are lots of different felonies." Lauren was a polished litigator; she had great skill at obfuscation.

I knew I was getting near the end of any license I had to continue to press her. "Are our kids . . . in any jeopardy? Are we? Tell me that."

Lauren hesitated. Her hesitation, more than anything else she'd said, confirmed for me that Burning Man Lady's recitation of the events on Friday night might have some approximation to the truth.

"It's better that you don't know any of this, Alan. Trust me. It's become . . . involved. You know what lawyers can be like? Well, in this situation we're talking big-time lawyers. If any of this leaks it will get ten times worse."

"Is Mattin one of the big-time lawyers?"

She lowered her voice to a whisper and opened her purple eyes wide. "I expect all this to blow over. Okay?"

"Really?" I said. I was very surprised.

"Yes. Now will you leave it alone? Please? I've already said more than I should. Let's enjoy lunch."

I was in the strange circumstance of knowing way too much, and altogether too little, to stop with what I had so far. I really wanted to know what Lauren knew that caused her to believe that an allegation of rape would evaporate like the aftermath of a routine July thunderstorm.

I pushed just a little more. "Does Diane know what happened? Were she and Raoul there when whatever went down, went down?"

"Can we talk about something else? Please?"

I would have to go to Diane for more information. For me, going to Diane for information was like going to Tiffany for diamonds.

Lauren and I hadn't had a chance to talk about my meeting with Raoul over the weekend. Every time I'd started to bring it up with her, it seemed that something had intruded. The phone rang, the kids--something.

I said, "My meeting with Raoul? Did you know the
Daily Camera
property is for sale? The whole thing?"

She immediately looked down the length of the narrow dining room toward the restaurant windows that fronted Pearl Street. She looked back at me. "I heard rumors a while ago that some Denver developers were interested," she said. "The guy who did that high-rise condo near the convention center? You know the one I'm talking about? Him. But I thought that deal fell through."

I lowered my voice. "Raoul wanted to talk to me about the
Camera,
indirectly. He told me he's part of a cabal that's made an offer for the whole site, with plans to redevelop the Pearl Street side. They're in due diligence right now. Everything I'm telling you, by the way, is covered by nondisclosure."